Virtual Computer

ITWiser are proud to be officially partnered with Virtual Computer. Virtual Computer provides the IDV software that we use to create and manage our VDI / IDV networks. The client machines use NxTop Engine as an operating system which talks to the NxTop Center software installed on a Windows 2008 R2 Server.

How it works

You replace the OS on your PC's with a virtualization system (NxTop Engine). When it boots you get access to Google Chrome, RDP and also get a choice of which Virtual Machine to run. Alternatively we can set it to boot straight into one Virtual Machine i.e. Windows 7. The system features:

This solution gives the ability to encrypt all computer hard drives for laptop and desktops. So if you lose your laptop, someone else can€t simply take your hard disk out, put it as a slave in their computer and read all your data from it.

This is customizable so you can force the system to boot into Windows 7 if you like. However you have the option to boot up to a selection system quickly. This allows the choice of opening Google Chrome to surf the internet only. Or the user can choose which VM to boot up. You can have Win7Corp and Win7Home for network PC’s. So when at home the users can load the Win7Home system and install what they like on it but it can’t connect to the work domain. The Win7Corp system can be the network system that is locked down so users can’t change settings, see Kiosk Mode below. You can have multiple VM’s per machine as required depending on how much RAM your system has.

This is designed so you can create a few VM images and distribute the same image to multiple PC’s. So at the moment you will install every PC one by one which is time consuming. With this we can install a virtual machine with Windows 7/XP/Vista etc. and all your apps. Then once we have done this, push this virtual machine out to all users or a department etc. If you need to patch the system, you can clone the VM, patch it offline and test it then point users to the new image when you are happy with it ensuring all users get the same experience.
The big benefit of kiosk mode is that it can wipe out any changes to the system files upon reboot. So if a user on the corporate virtual machine installs Itunes, Open Office, Games, other third party apps. Then as soon as they reboot, the PC will wipe out these changes and revert to the original clean system. The benefit of this is that it gives excellent protection against viruses, malware, spyware, phishing apps, users putting third party apps on the system and so on. It makes managing any network a lot easier as you know exactly what is running on that computer and would have tested it before hand.

Since these ‘virtual machine’s’ (Corporate, Home,etc.) are virtualized your hardware doesn’t matter. The affect this has is that normally if a machine fails, you replace it with what is in stock. Normally the kit will be newer with new components needing different drivers. Traditionally you take 3hrs to install windows and drivers, several more hours to install then restore all the apps and data so normally around a day of downtime from the moment you get the new PC. With virtual machines you load NxTop Engine in less than 1hr, then run a restore to restore the virtual machine exactly as it was at the last backup, saving hours/days.

You can patch one or a small number of virtual machines then deploy that one virtual machine to all users instead of pushing patches out to everyone on the network. If a patch goes wrong you can roll back to the previous un-patched virtual machine. Patching has never been as easy!

The system allows you to backup all PC changes daily. By monitoring changes only, users don’t get a long winded backup system that slows the system down. This means when a laptop gets lost or damaged you can restore exactly the same system they had before in half the time it would normally take. All backup traffic is encrypted securely.

If a laptop or PC gets lost or stolen, we can send a kill command to it. So when the laptop is turned on and first tries to talk on the internet, it sees the kill command from your server and wipes itself clean. Expiration can also be enabled so if a PC doesn’t check in with the server for say 90 days, it then wipes itself. The kill system first wipes off the virtual machines via low level formatting and scrambling of disk data. Then it wipes its own virtualization platform so your data can be wiped without the thief knowing about it until it’s too late. Adding this to the encryption it’s impossible to recover data from a stolen device providing Excellent security levels for all devices

NxTop Center

Transparent data protection

Efficient data backup communication

Fast to recover / restore

Remote office caching server - Local backup storage

Centralized on to many virtual machine provisioning

Scalable solution

Active Directory Integration

NxTop Engine

True type 1 hypervisor for maximum performance & security

Unmatched hardware compatibility

Virtual machine isolation

Hardware abstraction

Improved user experience

Hard disk encryption

Detailed policy controls

Remote kill including lost data destruction

To find out more information about how this fits into your business get in touch today!

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